Giggling at the Precipice

 

It happens every time. 

I have expectations.

I have dreams and wishes. 

I make PLANS.

And nothing, NOTHING, ever turns out like I think it will.

That doesn't mean it's worse. In fact, it's often better, but still....it's not what I PLANNED.

I should know this by now. 

There's a book about it in the Bible, one that I just finished teaching. 

Remember Ecclesiastes? Bet I know what you remember about it.

"Meaningless, meaningless. Everything is meaningless", right?

Of course, this is a mistranslation, one of many in the Bible, but this one is kind of important. The Hebrew word here is hevel, which doesn't mean meaningless but means a smoke or vapor, something that's there one minute and gone the next, that shifts and moves without warning, then vanishes entirely, something without substance. 

Yup, that's it all right. My plans are all hevel. Seemingly real, but not solid. And they're supposed to be that way. And we don't like it. In fact, the early Jews thought about kicking Ecclesiastes out of the Bible entirely because it was so pessimisstic and confusing.

Ecclesiastes teaches me that I'm an insignificant speck in the universe, that universe is completely random, and oh yes, the big one...we are all going to die.

Lovely. Just what I wanted to hear on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon.

You can't control your life, it teaches, so stop trying. Learn to hold things with an open hand because you really only have control over one thing and that's your attitude towards the present moment. Stop worrying, it says, and choose to enjoy a good conversation with a friend or the sun on your face or a good meal with people that you care about. The simple things in life, yes, and both the good things and the bad because both are rich gifts from God. We are not copping out in this. We’re just admitting what we have to work with.

You know, that doesn't sound so bad, but what if we want life to be predictable? Tough luck, Ecclesiastes says. It isn't. And there's a reason for this.

Earlier in Proverbs, we're told that living by wisdom and the fear of the Lord have real advantages. On the whole life will probably go better for you. See but the problem is that even living by wisdom and the fear of the Lord, they're hevel too because they don't guarantee a good life. Good people die tragically and horrible people live long and prosper. There are just too many exceptions and so even wisdom is hevel, again not meaningless but an enigma. Wisdom doesn't work the way you think it should. So what's the way forward in the midst of all this hevel? Here paradoxically the teacher Ecclesiastes discovers the key to the true enjoyment of life under the sun. It's accepting hevel. It's acknowledging that everything in your life is totally out of your control. It's Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill and laughing. It's us hanging onto the rock ledge and giggling at the absurdity of it all because it doesn't matter whether we let go or not.

Even my expectations about what life ought to be are ultimately hevel, hevel. I can only hear myself. I can’t think like God. Everything under the sun is utterly hevel. But when I come to adopt a posture of total trust in God, it frees me to simply enjoy my life as I actually experience it not as I think it ought to be.

So letting go or not letting go, life will be what it is. Chaotic, unpredictable, and blessed by a God who is the only one in the mix who actually knows what He is doing. Trying to be OK with that. 

Image: Dreamstime

The Deceptive Pleasure of Being Right

 

My best friend, AKA my fiancee Steve, gave me this shirt shortly after we began our relationship. It took very little time for someone as perceptive as he is to discover how I think and to nudge me into being careful of it. And he got it. I love being right. 

Now, there are reasons for this - old tapes of a life filled with congratulations of intelligence and, along with them, oneupsmanship from people driven to prove they were smarter than I was, but nevertheless, it was a worldview that poisoned my understanding of the world. It did. It led me to think being smart was enough and it's not. Not by a long shot. It made me stuck up, condescending, and devoid of empathy. And I missed some of the best parts of life. 

Wasted on the Way

Crosby, Stills, and Nash got it earlier than I did, but our shared understanding of attitude errors is neither new nor old. It's constant. Everybody does it at one time or another. And we're still doing it. It's pretty insidious, being right, and especially so when we apply it to our life in and attitude toward God. 

Take the introduction to the sermon on the mount, for instance. Those Beatitudes we love so much, but really don't want to think about too  deeply. The blessings that come with being poor in spirit, and in meekness, mercy and peacemaking and the rest. Do you know what you have to give up to do any of these things? The deceptive pleasure of being right. 

Yup. Poverty of spirit is exactly the opposite of self congratulations and condescension. Meekness allows for strength, but strength under control, not strength unleashed and displayed. Mercy demands relinquishing that which we think we have a intrinsic right to. Peacemaking allows for other people's ideas to come before, or at least in conjunction with, our own. The result of all of these positions is community, not individualism. Not the relentless advancing of our own agenda or opinion. We have to relinquish the satisfaction of being right. Not give up our search for truth or drive for innovation, but make them obedient to God.

One of my college friends says that the moment one conversant thinks they are incontrovertibly right, the conversation is over. This has the ring of truth about it. And the damage done is even greater if one of the conversants is God. 

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness (not rightness) for they will be filled. - Matt 5:6  (Emphasis mine)

See Me, Feel Me

 

How often have you heard it?

"You are made in the image of God."

Sounds pretty good when you think of it. The love that God had for us when He decided to share His creation with a being that bore some kind of resemblance to Him hearkens back to the feeling we have when we look at our newborn and think he has our eyes or she has our smile. We belong together in some way. 

And we do. 

"Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky,"-Genesis 1:26

Hmmm. Made in God's image. You know what that means? If its Hebrew root matters, it comes from the word 'tsalem', which means 'shape' or 'shadow'. Something that kind of looks like something else, but isn't. Something that is connected to its source, something that conforms to its outline and follows it around but shares no common materiality or consciousness with it. Kind of like a mirror image or that dark spot behind you on a sunny day. There is shape but no substance. 

Now, that probably doesn't mean that God, excepting for Jesus, has arms and legs like we do, but it sure does sound like, if we are made in God's image, we are like Him in some very limited and imitative ways.

But, there's a second part to this verse. We are also made in God's likeness, and that comes from a different Hebrew word, 'demut'. This word means something else entirely. This word infers a kind of intimate blood relationship. It means to resemble someone in both appearance and action. 

This is where it gets interesting. 

It looks to me like 'image' is what we're given by virtue of being made human. It's something we are but 'likeness' is something else. It's something we do. It's what gives us the ability to take our proper place not only among the rest of God's creation but in doing so, also take our place beside God Himself as His earthly agents. God's likeness is what we acquire through living with Him and establishing the closeness to Him that grows our spirit to be more like His. It's what allowed Abraham to be God's friend. It's what allows us to establish a real fellowship with Him and to know Him. 

Image is what we are. Likeness is what we grow. 

There's seeing and there's feeling. Promise and fruit. We are never quite done, but the journey is both privilege and joy. 

Image: Fernando Rodrigues

No Fear - the Biblical Books of Wisdom

I want to say that I don't know what ever possessed me to teach the books of Wisdom - Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job - but I'd be lying. I'm teaching them because they are unconventional, contrary, and packed with existential angst. Perfect.

We've gotten through the first two already, and are poised to begin Job tonight and only now do I begin to understand where this is all going. There's Proverbs with its neat, confident little phrases that don't always work out in real living. After all, the wise do not always have good fortune, do they? Nor do the diligent always enjoy wealth. Then there's Ecclesiastes, who, contrary to some translations, does not say that everything is meaningless, but that everything is the Hebrew hevel, meaning that they shift and fade like smoke. Gone the Proverbial confidence. Replace it with cynical reality, a world we know all too well in which we try to grab on to something only to see it fade away and disappear, leaving us feel a kind of betrayal. And of course, there's our friend Job, who suffers beyond imagination by God's specific proclamation just to see whether he will be able to remain loyal and faithful to God. He doesn't.

At the end of all this, all we really want is something that makes sense in the way we understand sense. We want God to be just. We want, actually, what Proverbs lays out. We want the world to give health and good fortune to the faithful and to punish everybody else. But it doesn't happen that way. We think that by the end of Job, God will explain how and why the world works as it does, but He explains nothing. God, when He finally gets involved openly in the whole Job affair, just sits back and dares anyone to be Him. Can you create a universe?, he asks. And, of course, we can't.

All we're left with is the idea that we need to live with the fear of the Lord. 

Really? Fear of the Lord, as I was taught, is a healthy respect for God - for who He is, for what He does, and what He gives. And that's all fine if there is some assurance that He will let me in on at least some of His reasoning. Come on, God. Give me a break. I keep asking Why and get no answer.

And God just smiles. 

And I've come to understand that this lack of explanation is where the fear part comes in. It's a kind of respect we're not used to. It's the kind that just asks us to remember who God is and who we are. He loves us but owes us nothing. We love Him and He tells us to trust and expect nothing but be grateful for everything. 

OK. Well, then, fear the Lord but fear nothing else. The road is wide open. It will need to be. I'm going to have to do more U-ey's than I thought.

Image: Reddit

Getting out from Under

 

I'm moving again.

Six years ago, I left the place I'd lived for more than twenty years, one that would have been a rural paradise in many minds, but for me had become oppressive in a way I could hardly describe.  And I did what so many my age and in my situation do - I downsized. I sold, discarded, burned, and gave away a lot of my possessions. 

It's a wearying thing, to do that. Not because one regrets getting rid of them, but because of the mental decision-making involved - evaluating their purpose and importance in one's life, and then doing whatever is the appropriate thing. There's only so much of that one can do in a day. There are some basic prinicples that can make it easier, though, and I've found ones that work for me.

More than anything else, I've found it imperitive that whatever I own serve me in some way. I'm sure you've discovered that much of what we own works the other way around - that what we own demands something from us. We have to store it, care for it, insure it, repair it...yada yada yada.  That, however, is not why we acquired them. We acquired what we own because they were supposed to add something to our lives so, as I make decisions about what to keep, I try to remember this.

What I own must still give me more, much more, than what I have to give it. The objects that surround me have to bring me some kind of pleasure commensurate with the trouble they cause. My car is a good example. It costs plenty to run and maintain, but I need to find pleasure in the way it looks, how it sounds, and the way it feels when I jump on the gas and maneuver it down the road. That's how it pays me back. More than just a way to get from one place to another, but something that has the ability to make my soul sing with freedom and skill.  Ahhhh...yes. 

Ah yes. Smooth. Quiet even under turbocharged acceleration. Comfortable. Solid. Reliable. Just today, when I was unloading some of my castoffs at the local Salvation Army, the attendant stood back and smiled. "That's my favorite car", he said. I smiled back. "Mine, too."  I will keep it as long as I can.

But as for all my other stuff. The stuff I'll have to move - or not have to move as the case may be. My partner, into whose house we are moving, keeps reminding me that we will have plenty of room for anything I want to bring. But that's not the point. The point is that the stuff I own needs to earn its way in my life. It needs serve me and to fulfill the purpose I had when I acquired it in the first place. The things I keep need to do more than bring me pleasure because they exist. They need to earn their place as symbols of beauty or memory or imagination. They need to be select and few so that their individual significance is not lost. I need to not only enjoy their use but their weight and meaning because outside of my imposition of meaning, they have none. 

They are just things. They get all of their importance from me and their importance is that I am enlarged, not enslaved, by them. 

Those that make the grade, well, welcome to my new life. Those that do not, I will not miss you. Which is kind of the point. 

Image: JWalking

Who Really Wants to Be Alone?

 

Ah, Greta Garbo. She was famous for saying she wanted to be alone.

Some people have crowded, even frantic, social lives. Some jealously guard their privacy to the point of barricading themselves and the places they live. Most of us live somewhere in between, trying to balance social and private lives, and we do it for different reasons. Sometimes it's just for the sake of sanity. Sometimes, we do it so that we can maintain a level of creativity that allows us to exercise the gifts we've been given. Sometimes, we do it so we make sure the members of our families aren't shortchanged in attention. Sometimes, we do it to grow our spirit. 

Greta is known for saying she wanted to be alone but it is less known that she made a distinction. She didn't want to be left alone, she said. She wanted to be let alone, and the difference for her was profound. The problem is that solitude has a partner - loneliness. No matter how much we sometimes crave peace and quiet, too much of it leads to a hollow result, a place where the echoes just get too loud. Sometimes, the solitude is worth the price. Sometimes not. 

It seems that solitude and community are not meant to be exclusive states. Each has a purpose. I don't need companions for everything - indeed, for some things they are counterproductive. But I do need them for some things. I've long held that a church community, for instance, is not the place I commune with God. It is far too loud for that. But it is the place I test and share that communion. 

There's an African proverb that says, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." As I hear that and think of the Kenyan Maasai - the tribe famous for running across the East African plains - and how they seem to be both alone and together at the same time, self-possessed but always aware they are in company with their fellow travelers.

I like the idea. It seems right to me. Finding the balance which, by the way, changes with times and situations, seems important. Right now, I feel it shifting. Having lived much of my adult life delighting in the company of friends often and well, the balance is shifting toward more quiet, maybe because I'm folding in the feathers of wings I spent a lifetime forging in preparation for final sleep. 

A friend gave me a copy of a book in 1990 to commemorate some plays we had read together with a group of others. It was a particularly sweet time and he included with it a quote by playwright and theologian Charles Williams:

"Much was possible to one in solitude; perhaps the final transmutations and achievements in the zones on the yonder side of the central knowledge were possible only to the spirit in solitude. But some things were possible only to one in companionship, and of these the most important one was balance. No mind was so good that it did not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and blindness and bigotry and folly...balance - and movement in balance - as an eagle sails up on the wind - this was the truth of life and beauty in life."

Yes. I think Charles might have been right. 

Equality and the Philosopher Kings

 

It's hard to resist connecting theology and philosophy. They originally grew up together in the ancient world and it was only in the early 300s AD that they began to be forced apart. I maintain that they still belong together and are all the poorer for existing in different places, each denying the validity of the other, so today I'm going to try to piecemeal a partial reconciliation. Starting with Socrates.

Good old Socrates. Brilliant but elitist. He thought men were made of three kinds: The workers or producers who are ruled by appetite, the soldiers or protectors who are ruled by spirit, and the rulers or philosopher-kings, who are the advanced decision-makers ruled by logic. He thought men could be trained to advance from one kind to another, but most often, they were born to a certain type and were best off living within the confines of it. 

Was he right? Are there philosopher-kings who see farther and higher than others? Is is all right to praise these extraordinary people for this ability and to exult them for their vision? We do, you know. Are followers best off following? 

Well, think about it this way. We are all made in God's image, like God in that we are primarily spirit having a material experience. In this, we are all equal. But Socrates was right in that we may be equal by virture of our common humanity, but we are not the same. There are standouts among humans, standouts in courage and proclamation. They are not more human, but they are a different kind of human. By ignoring either of these premises, we have made ourselves poorer. We either deny the glory of man or deny his ability to attain the greatest heights to which he is able. I don't want to do either.

All humans are created equal. But they are not created the same. 

I once heard someone attest that a parent's highest responsibility was to help their child discover what they were made to do and help them attain it. They were right on two scores. First, that they were made by God and second that He made them for something particular in this world. One is based on faith and one is based on a school of philosophy. And they belong together.

Image: Psychiatric Times